The Highways Agency has published two separate pre-tenders, for a centralised database and for data transmission and telecommunications cables.
The deal for a fully integrated and centralised database "to support the agency's strategic road network operations" is worth between £35m to £40m.
According to a notice published in …

Oh dear

Place Your Bets

+ 100m more like it!

I'm sure I won't be the first, or the last, to say this will fail terribly and cost 3 times as much as the tender and be totally exposed to the outside world. Why does it have to accessible worldwide, it's the UK agency... or did I miss something....? Why do we want foreign people to have "secure" access to these systems, I can't think of a sensible reason.

anpr

robbing basturds

I think hohoho is close. In my experience most of the roadworks on the motorway network in the last 4 to 5 years has been to install communications cables (In purple ducting). The signs say this is for traffic information systems. The current signs installed in the last 2 years or so are probably about 5k pixels, mostly monochrome. Bandwidth required - 25kps at most. You could almosy do it with semaphore! So I reckon this for a fully networked nationwide anpr average speed limit system and this contract provides the last part of the jigsaw puzzle. It obviously needs to be accessible worlwide so the prosecution paperwork can be done in India.

Why are roadworks always extended to the average speed camera even if there is half a mile or so of road where there is no roadworks.

bandwidth

The fibres in those purple conduit convey much more than messages for the information boards. Think about the full motion video cameras that are along just about every stretch of carriage way on most motorways!

I have already proposed this to them,

and suggested the database should be separate from the network.

I'd even do it for them, for a tenth of the 40 million they propose, plus limited hardware and electricity, and yet, as you can guess, I'm not even going to get my foot in the door because of <text removed to protect the innocent.>

You can guess who will be in the running for it however, and you can also be sure they'll have salesmen disguised as principal engineers or principal account managers. They won't even let the client leave the door, until they've figured out how much money they got.

The features I proposed last year have been fed into this. Will it succeed? No. Because once the contract is signed, it will become more advantageous for the outsourcer, to suggest endless enhancements, rather than deliver what they want.

Hmmmm

The obvious point is this is a waste of cash.

The more sinister point lurking underneath is wtf do they need £18m worth of optical cables for? This isn't pushing traffic patterns or works data around (which could probably be done cheaper wirelessly anyway), this is probably something evil like full scale number plate recognition, with HD video counting pores on the driver's face. (Maybe I'm just being paranoid after reading that RIPA article)

Or it might be back-door way to fund the Birmingham office moving in to the fancy pants new Cube building...